Success continues to elude the A2B electric bike people. I’ll tell you, most of the people in town you see on these e-bikes are somehow affiliated with the company itself, believe it or not. Something like $5000 is too too much for what these bikes are, but the other problem is that I wouldn’t want one if they gave me one for free.* I suppose if you’d paid me to ride one about and take charge of its safekeeping and lug it up and down stairs, well then I’d think about it. And if I accepted your deal, I’d be just like most of the other A2Ber’s in town, like, apparently, ebikefan, getting paid to operate an A2B…

*So don’t give me this oh, well, if you can’t afford a premium bike stuff. An A2B might be fun for Jay Leno to collect and have to gather dust in one of his garages (I’m seriously, I think he has one), but there’s a reason why they’re not popular…

*Which is actually not a good day of the week to protest, since buses normally full Tuesday-Thursday are much less full on Fridays, not to go full Trotskyite on you, Comrades. I’m only just saying, Comrades.

Our SFMTA issued st least three tickets on this short block the other day, you know, to punish people for blocking a street cleaning machine.

Here’s the Before, with an ugly, ugly trash-strewn street…

…and here’s the After, with the newly-beautiful* street:

What a difference!

Hurray! Hurray for SFGov.

(IRL, this is SFGov reacting to market discipline. If it made this much money per minute rehabbing addicts, it would spend a lot more time and effort rehabbing addicts…)

*Actually, this short block, and this one only, was recently repaved, a few years back, right before an election, and it happens to be the block where a long-time leader of a long-time community group just happens to reside, and I thought, where are we, Chicago West? That’s just what I thought, I don’t know why this block got repaved before others in the Western Addition. As I said, it’s kind of random….

Restriping Oak between Octavia and Laguna and reconfiguring parking so that two full right turn-only lanes would stretch the entire block of Oak and two additional lanes would continue straight

What’s happened is a change of driving culture so that nowadays, drivers feel less like suckers when they queue up in the right lane of Oak and there’s less line-jumping to the right between Laguna and Octavia:

None Shall Pass! over this newly painted solid line:

Some still do of course, but this happens less than before:

Now’s not the time to get into why the 100% perfectly earthquake safe Central Freeway was ash-canned for this deadly Octavia Boulevard monstrosity. But now, apparently, is the time to try to fix things, you know, a decade later.

Already, those wishing to stay in Frisco now have a clearer shot of escaping this mess by using the left lanes. New construction with $3000-something per month non-rent controlled studios will dominate the north side of this block. We’ll see how this one goes.

It’s hard for a needlessly prideful political animal like the SFMTA to admit that it made a mistake constructing this “vision” of the New Boulevard Movement or whatever the Hell it was called backed when the failed Boulevard Movement was in full swing. But now, after some Berkeley prof has gotten all that money in consulting fees and basked in the glory of those award ceremonies, our SFMTA is less possessive of its creation – it’s more willing to admit its mistakes, if not through a press release, but at least by trying to fix things.

Now, is it good for traffic to back up a half-mile on a regular weekend afternoon? No, but this is an improvement nevertheless.